Tom Clancy's Jack Ryan Books 7-12 (74 page)

“Did you do it, Ed?” Durling asked bluntly, his eyes boring in on his Vice President. He cursed the man for forcing him to deal with one more problem among the multiple crises hanging over his presidency now. But the Post piece gave him no choice.

“Why are you hanging me out to dry? Why didn’t you at least
warn
me of this?”

The President waved around the Oval Office. “There are a lot of things you can do in here and there are things you can’t do. One of them is to interfere with a criminal investigation.”

“Don’t give me that! A lot of people have—”

“Yeah, and they all paid a price for it, too.”
It’s not my ass that needs to be covered,
Roger Durling didn’t say.
I’m not risking mine for yours.
“You didn’t answer my question.”

“Look, Roger!” Ed Kealty snarled back. The President stopped him with a raised hand and a quiet voice.

“Ed, I have an economy in meltdown. I have dead sailors in the Pacific Ocean. I can’t spare the energy for this. I can’t spare the political capital. I can’t spare the time. Answer my question,” Durling commanded.

The Vice President flushed, his head snapping to the right before he spoke. “All right, I like women. I’ve never hidden that from anyone. My wife and I have an understanding.” His head came back. “But I have
never, NEVER
molested, assaulted, raped, or forced myself on anybody in my whole fucking life. Never. I don’t
have
to.”

“Lisa Beringer?” Durling said, consulting his notes for the name.

“She was a sweet thing, very bright, very sincere, and she begged me to—well, you can guess. I explained to her that I couldn’t. I was up for reelection that year, and besides she was too young. She deserved somebody her age to marry and give her kids and a good life. She took it hard, started drinking—maybe something else, but I don’t think so. Anyway, one night she headed off on the Beltway and lost it, Roger. I was there for the funeral. I still talk with her parents. Well,” Kealty said, “not lately, I guess.”

“She left a note, a letter behind.”

“More than one.” Kealty reached into his coat pocket and handed two envelopes over. “I’m surprised nobody noticed the date on the one the FBI has. Ten days before her death. This one is a week later, and this one is the day she was killed. My staff found them. I suppose Barbara Linders found the other one. None were ever mailed. I think you’ll find some differences between them, all three, as a matter of fact.”

“The Linders girl says that you—”

“Drugged her?” Kealty shook his head. “You know about my drinking problem, you knew it when you asked me in. Yeah, I’m an alcoholic, but I had my last drink two years ago.” A crooked smile. “My sex life is even better now. Back to Barbara. She was sick that day, the flu. She went to the pharmacy on the Hill and got a prescription, and—”

“How do you know that?”

“Maybe I keep a diary. Maybe I just have a good memory. Either way, I know the date this happened. Maybe one of my staffers checked the records of the pharmacy, and maybe the medication she took had a label on the bottle, one that says don’t drink while using these capsules. I didn’t know that, Roger. When I have a cold—well, back then, anyway, I used brandy. Hell,” Kealty admitted, “I used booze for a lot of things. So I gave some to her, and she became very cooperative. A little too cooperative, I suppose, but I was half in the bag myself, and I figured it was just my well-known charm.”

“So what are you telling me? You’re not guilty?”

“You want to say I’m an alley cat, can’t keep it zipped? Yeah, I guess so. I’ve been to priests, to doctors, to a clinic once—covering that up was some task. Finally I went to the head of neuroscience at Harvard Medical School. They think there’s a part of the brain that regulates our drives, just a theory, but a good one. It goes along with hyperactivity. I was a hyperactive child. I still don’t ever sleep more than six hours a night. Roger, I am all those things, but I am not a rapist.”

So there it was, Durling thought. Not a lawyer himself, he had appointed, consulted, and heard enough of them to know what he’d been told. Kealty could defend himself on two grounds: that the evidence against him was more equivocal than the investigators imagined, and that it wasn’t really his fault. The President wondered which of the defenses might be true. Neither? One? Both?

“So what are you going to do?” he asked the Vice President, using much the same voice he’d summoned a few hours earlier for the Ambassador from Japan. He was increasingly sympathetic with the man sitting across from him, in spite of himself. What if the guy really was telling the truth? How could he know—and that was what the jury would say, after all, if it got that far; and if a jury would think that, then what would the Judiciary hearings be like? Kealty still had a lot of markers out on the Hill.

“Somehow I just don’t think anyone’s going to print up DURLING/KEALTY bumper stickers this summer, right?” The question came with a smile of sorts.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” the President confirmed, cold again. This wasn’t a time for humor.

“I don’t want to hurt you, Roger. I did two days ago. If you’d warned me, I could have told you these things sooner, saved everybody a lot of time and trouble. Including Barbara. I lost track of her. She’s very good on civil-rights stuff, a good head on her, and a good heart. It was only that one time, you know. And she stayed in my office afterwards,” Kealty pointed out.

“We’ve covered that, Ed. Tell me what you want.”

“I’ll go. I’ll resign. I don’t get prosecuted.”

“Not good enough,” Durling said in a neutral voice.

“Oh, I’ll admit my weaknesses. I’ll apologize to you, honorable public servant that you are, for any harm I might have done to your presidency. My lawyers will meet with their lawyers, and we’ll negotiate compensation. I leave public life.”

“And if that’s not good enough?”

“It will be,” Kealty said confidently. “I can’t be tried in a court until the constitutional issues are resolved. Months, Roger. All the way to summer, probably, maybe all the way to the convention. You can’t afford that. I figure the worst-case scenario for you is, the Judiciary Committee sends the bill of impeachment to the floor of the House, but the House doesn’t pass it, or maybe does, narrowly, and then the Senate trial ends up with a hung jury, so to speak. Do you have any idea how many favors I’ve done there, and in the Senate?” Kealty shook his head. “It’s not worth the political risk to you, and it distracts you and Congress from the business of government. You need all the time you have. Hell, you need more than that.” Kealty stood and headed toward the door to the President’s right, the one that was so perfectly blended into the curved, eggshell-white walls and gold trim. He spoke his final words without turning. “Anyway, it’s up to you now.”

It angered President Roger Durling that, in the end, the easy way out might be the just way out, as well—but nobody would ever know. They would only know that his final action was politically expedient in a moment of history that demanded political expediency. An economy potentially in ruins, a war just started—he didn’t have the time to fool with this. A young woman had died. Others claimed to have been molested. But what if the dead young girl had died for other reasons, and what if the others—
Goddamn it,
he swore in his mind. That was something for a jury to decide. But it had to pass through three separate legal procedures before a jury could decide, and then any defense lawyer with half a brain could say that a fair trial was impossible anyway after C-SPAN had done its level best to tell the whole world every bit of evidence, tainting everything, and denying Kealty his constitutional right to a fair and impartial trial before disinterested jurors. That ruling was likely enough in a Federal district court trial, and even more so on appeal—and would gain the victims nothing. And what if the bastard actually was, technically speaking, innocent of a crime? An open zipper, distasteful though it was, did not constitute a crime.

And neither he nor the country needed the distraction. Roger Durling buzzed his secretary.

“Yes, Mr. President?”

“Get me the Attorney General.”

He’d been wrong, Durling thought. Sure, he could interfere with a criminal investigation. He had to. And it was easy. Damn.

26

Catch-up

“He really said that?” Ed Foley leaned forward. It was easier for Mary Pat to grasp it than for her husband.

“Sure enough, and it’s all on his honor as a spy,” Jack confirmed, quoting the Russian’s words.

“I always did like his sense of humor,” the DDO said, getting her first laugh of the day, and probably the last. “He’s studied us so hard that he’s more American than Russian.”

Oh,
Jack thought,
that’s it.
That explained Ed. The opposite was true of him. A Soviet specialist for nearly all of his career, he was more Russian than American. The realization occasioned his own smile.

“Thoughts?” the National Security Advisor asked.

“Jack, it gives them the ID of the only three humint assets we have on the ground over there. Bad joss, man,” Edward Foley said.

“That’s a consideration,” Mary Patricia Foley agreed. “But there’s another consideration. Those three assets are cut off. Unless we can communicate with them, they might as well not be there. Jack, how serious is this situation?”

“We are for all practical purposes at war, MP.” Jack had already relayed the gist of the meeting with the Ambassador, including his parting comment.

She nodded. “Okay, they’re giving a war. Are we going to come?”

“I don’t know,” Ryan admitted. “We have dead people out there. We have U.S. territory with another flag flying over it right now. But our ability to respond effectively is severely compromised—and we have this little problem at home. Tomorrow the markets and the banking system are going to have to come to terms with some very unpleasant realities.”

“Interesting coincidence,” Ed noted. He was too old a hand in the intelligence business to believe in coincidences. “What’s going to happen with that stuff, Jack? You know a lot about it.”

“I don’t have a clue, guys. It’s going to be bad, but how bad, and how it’s going to be bad ... nobody’s been here before. I suppose the good news is that things can’t fall further. The bad news is the mentality that goes with the situation will be like a person trapped in a burning building. You may be safe where you are, but you can’t get out, either.”

“What agencies are looking into things?” Ed Foley asked.

“Just about all of them. The Bureau’s the lead agency. It has the most available investigators. The SEC is better suited to it, but they don’t have the troops for something this big.”

“Jack, in a period of less than twenty-four hours, somebody leaked the news on the Vice President”—he was in the Oval Office right now, they all knew—“the market went in the crapper, and we had the attack on Pacific Fleet, and you just told us the most harmful thing to us is this economic thing. If I were you, sir—”

“I see your point,” Ryan said, cutting Ed off a moment too soon for a complete picture. He made a few notes, wondering how the hell he’d be able to prove anything, as complex as the market situation was. “Is anybody that smart?”

“Lots of smart people in the world, Jack. Not all of them like us.” It was very much like talking with Sergey Nikolay’ch, Ryan thought, and like Golovko, Ed Foley was an experienced pro for whom paranoia was always a way of life and often a tangible reality. “But we have something immediate to consider here.”

“These are three good officers,” Mary Pat said, taking the ball from her husband. “Nomuri’s been doing a fine job sliding himself into their society, taking his time, developing a good network of contacts. Clark and Chavez are as good a team of operators as we have. They have good cover identities and they ought to be pretty safe.”

“Except for one thing,” Jack added.

“What’s that?” Ed Foley asked, cutting his wife off.

“The PSID knows they’re working.”

“Golovko?” Mary Pat asked. Jack nodded soberly. “That son of a bitch,” she went on. “You know, they still are the best in the world.” Which was not an altogether pleasant admission from the Deputy Director (Operations) of the Central Intelligence Agency.

“Don’t tell me they have the head of Japanese counter-intel under their control?” her husband inquired delicately.

“Why not, honey? They do it to everybody else.” Which was true. “You know, sometimes I think we ought to hire some of their people just to give lessons.” She paused for a second. “We don’t have a choice.”

“Sergey didn’t actually come out and say that, but I don’t know how else he could have known. No,” Jack agreed with the DDO, “we don’t really have any choice at all.”

Even Ed saw that now, which was not the same as liking it. “What’s the
quid
on this one?”

“They want everything we get out of THISTLE. They’re a little concerned about this situation. They were caught by surprise, too, Sergey tells me.”

“But they have another network operating there. He told you that, too,” MP observed. “And it has to be a good one, too.”

“Giving them the ‘take’ from THISTLE in return for not being hassled is one thing—and a pretty big thing. This goes too far. Did you think this one all the way through, Jack? It means that they’ll actually be running our people for us.” Ed didn’t like that one at all, but on a moment’s additional consideration, it was plain that he didn’t see an alternative either.

“Interesting circumstances, but Sergey says he was caught with his drawers down. Go figure.” Ryan shrugged, wondering yet again how it was possible for three of the best-informed intelligence professionals in his country
not
to be able to understand what was going on.

“A lie on his part?” Ed wondered. “On the face of it, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense.”

“Neither does lying,” Mary Pat said. “Oh, I love these
matryoshka
puzzles. Okay, at least we know there are things we don’t know yet. That means we have a lot of things to find out, the quicker the better. If we let RVS run our people ... it’s risky, Jack, but—damn, I don’t see that we have a choice.”